This is a proposal for research on the life-long effects of educational attainment and academic performance on health, careers, and retirement, based on data from the Wisconsin Longitudinal Study (WLS). Data from new WLS surveys will be complemented by administrative record data (Complementary Data Collection and Management of this proposal). The WLS has followed a cohort of more than 10,000 youth - and more than 5000 of their sisters or brothers - from high school graduation to their deaths or to their early 60s. Thus, it provides unique opportunities to study education, careers, and their consequences for health, retirement, and mortality: baseline measurements of adolescent cognitive functioning, educational performance, school resources and programs, and ambition; detailed histories of education, family life, and careers; similar data for randomly selected brothers or sisters of the Wisconsin graduates. Familial patterns of resemblance or divergence in career lines and their consequences may be traced, and self-reports of key variables are validated with cross-sibling reports. Data have been obtained from the National Death Index on mortality by cause through 1998 for graduates, siblings, and their parents. Other new data will be obtained through telephone and mail surveys of graduates, siblings, spouses, and widows (proposed in a complementary R01). Among other aims, we will extend a social-psychological model socioeconomic achievement from youth through maturity, modifying it to add new explanatory variables and a richer set of health and disability outcomes. We will assess the changing impacts of schooling - including primary and secondary school resources - and of cognitive ability on earnings and other career outcomes. We will also use new analytic methods to look at effects of major contingent events, such as military service and type of college attended, on economic, psychological, and health outcomes.